On this night, some were destined to find no sleep.
Felicia sat on the hotel rooftop, gazing blankly at the moon. In truth, she wasn't thinking about anything at all, nor did she know what she should be thinking. She just sat there, unable to sleep.
"So, I figured you wouldn't be able to sleep, so I brought you some coffee. Sounds pretty strange, right? Like I'm trying to keep someone awake on purpose."
Peter came up the stairs to the rooftop, tossing a can of coffee toward Felicia. "What's on your mind?"
"Thinking about when a little brat who just started high school would start pretending to be mature enough to come up here and comfort people."
Peter, who had just twisted his coffee open, nearly choked on his first sip. Felicia seemed to smile with satisfaction. "Alright, actually, I wasn't thinking about anything. By the way, how's Venom? Fighting alongside me seemed to put quite a strain on him."
"His condition isn't bad, but it isn't great either. A lot of chocolate and some rest should fix him up."
Venom's current situation was a bit tricky. Even though he had increased his resistance by devouring Grendel, his weaknesses still existed. It was just that in most cases, Peter and Venom could finish off an opponent before taking serious damage. However, once they encountered a situation like the one when Venom possessed Felicia, it caused the symbiote itself to become unstable and more prone to collapse.
Even more troublesome was that everyone now knew Spider-Man used a symbiote to fight. Consequently, anyone who understood symbiote traits would specifically develop and research ways to counter them. Venom could greatly enhance Peter's basic abilities, but he also provided Peter with an obvious weakness.
Simply put, Venom himself was starting to have trouble keeping up with Peter. Furthermore, there were currently no evil symbiotes on Earth powerful enough for Venom to devour and upgrade. According to Venom himself, unless he could return to his home planet, Klyntar, this problem was somewhat unsolvable.
Peter didn't have any good solutions for the moment, because Felicia's situation had proven another, more troublesome fact: if it wasn't Peter using Venom, the probability of others losing control was very high. Of course, this wasn't an absolute; if the symbiote stayed bonded to a host for more than 48 hours, then the Venom influenced by Peter could, in turn, influence the other person.
However, regarding the issue with Venom, Peter truly didn't have any good ideas for the time being.
"Looks like you're doing alright. Uh, I'll be going then?"
"So, that's it? You let a girl wait for you on a rooftop all night, shivering in the wind, only to show up, glance at her, toss a can of coffee, and head back?"
Why did that sound so strange?
Peter stopped in his tracks and shrugged. Though it sounded odd, the way Felicia spoke suggested her mental state was actually quite good.
"To be honest, you guys worry about me a bit too much. I was a little heated back then, but actually... I've thought about these things for a long time. You know, the biggest advantage of planning these things alone is that you have plenty of boring time to think about what to do after you succeed."
"My dad told me a story when I was a kid. He said that in the old West, a man's wife and daughter were killed by a gang of cowboys. To get revenge, he hunted that cowboy for thirty years. When he finally found him, the cowboy was already a bedridden cripple, and the man himself was old."
Whenever Felicia thought about revenge, she thought of that story. She still remembered the conversation she had with her father as a child; she felt that man was too pitiful at the end. She believed he could have found a new life during the process of revenge and then continued that life after fulfilling it.
But in reality, Felicia found that this was nearly impossible. Just investigating the cause of her father's death and chasing Hydra was a task that consumed almost all her energy. In fact, if she hadn't encountered that situation with Luke Cage, perhaps the entire matter would have seen no progress at all.
"So, I'm lucky. Although I haven't thought about what I'll do after I succeed, I have enough time to think. I'm only seventeen."
As Felicia spoke, she patted her pants and stood up. "Oh, maybe I need to wait a bit longer. After all, I still have one more thing to do. A young boy asked me to make sure he doesn't lose his mind when he seeks revenge. I promised him."
"Did you promise?"
"Maybe not then, but I'm promising now."
Felicia smiled and walked over to Peter's side. She thought for a moment and then looked at him. "Speaking of which, I've always had a question."
"What?"
"Why do you feel that helping others is... something that needs to be done? Like right now, no one asked you to, and there's no necessity, yet you still came up to see if I was okay. You should know, in this world, not every good deed you do brings a benefit."
"If I did good deeds for benefits, I'd be a millionaire by now, at the very least." Peter shrugged. "No real reason. There are many things that don't need a reason; because it's the right thing to do, you do it. Most of the time, it's because people are always thinking about what benefit they can get that more and more bad people appear. If everyone thought about helping others, maybe the world wouldn't be so bad."
Peter thought of many people; they weren't bad or irredeemable at first. Like the Joker from next door said, sometimes it only takes one bad day to kill a man.
In that case, reducing every bad day was a good thing.
"But not everyone can be a good person. At the very least, while others are getting benefits, you're losing out. You could even say most people won't do that."
"There has never been a rule that says 'it's right because it's always been this way,' Felicia. Just like 'everyone else is doing bad things, so I'm an outcast if I don't,' doing the right thing never needs a reason."
Felicia couldn't help but laugh. "You don't understand what I mean."
Peter looked at her, confused.
"My meaning is, someone like you gets no reward while those people take the benefits. It's pitiful." She spoke as she walked past Peter, but she stopped halfway.
She gave him a light, fleeting kiss on the cheek.
"Don't get the wrong idea. This is just a reward. I don't like boys younger than me." Felicia stepped away, turning back to smile at Peter. "Have a pleasant journey for the rest of the trip, Spider-Man."
Peter stared blankly as Felicia left and closed the rooftop door. It was only then that he remembered Venom was resting, leaving him without even someone to tease him. He could only mutter to himself.
"Alright... have a pleasant journey for the rest of the trip, Spider-Man."